October 28, 2009

Lawrence Halprin was "the tribal elder of American landscape architecture," who had a "passion to give people as many options as possible to go this way or that, to reverse directions, to pause, to start over, to be alone, to meet others, and to experience as many different sights, smells and sounds as the site permits," and his wife was "the former Anna Schuman, a modern dancer and choreographer." He was born in Brooklyn in 1916 — he died last Sunday — but he studied at the University of Wisconsin and his original urge to become a landscape designer arose from seeing Taliesin East, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in here in Wisconsin. It was Anna who suggested the trip to Taliesin, back in 1939, and the "odd, improvised shape" was a dance deck he designed for her at Mount Tamalpais, which is not in Wisconsin. It's in California.

35 comments:

Okay, I guess technically that deck is a polyhedron and not symetrical, but it is still roughly rectangular and fairly conventional (although perhaps having trees poking through the deck was considered radical at the time).

I am a huge Wright fan, but Mr. Halprin's deck (beyond being big enough to dance on and in a nice location in Marin County, California) does not seem all that amazing to me.

Aren't most stages rectangles? I guess when she was at home, she just wanted something different. A triangle would be even more confining than a rectangle, but in the end, most women would be happy with a large diamond.

Henry, you just triggered a memory. Yeah improvised shapes are American.

I read The Island At the Center of the World last year (acutally I listened to it at the gym on my ipod). A facinating work, based on old Dutch colonial records found in Albany. The author's premise is while we have the Puritans at Massachusetts and the colony at Jamestown, it is really the overlooked Dutch settlement at New Amsterdam that at least equally and perhaps dominately helped create and shape the American character.

But one of the weird historical twists reported was the Swedish settlement on the Delaware (which imposed on the Dutch land claim from the mouth of the Delaware to the mouth of the Conneticut River)imported some "Forest Finns" who had immigrated to Sweden and were cutting down too many trees. The Swedes sent the Finns to the New World to work on some Pennsylvania trees. When the Dutch shooed the Swedes out, they invited the Finns to stay and to keep logging. The Finns started logging like beavers down into the Appalachians and influenced the new Scots-Irish settlers from Virginia in creating the American Log Cabin.

When the author told his theory to his Minnesotan Swedish father-in-law, he replied, "Well everyone knows if you want a good cabin you get a Finn to build it."

How did Halprin actually know that his wife could not be contained by a rectangle?

Did he learn this by subjecting her to containment in forms of various shapes, thereby confirming her ability to slip the surly bonds of rectangles, and only rectangles? What a strange, if kinky, relationship they must have had.

Their house must have been quite interesting. If it had rectangular elements, she'd POOF! escape at will. But if it borrowed it's design elements from round barns, for instance, she'd never escape and her career would have amounted to naught.

Good thing aircraft have cylindrical cabins, or poor Mrs. Halprin would have found travel most troublesome.

I too knew that my wife could not be contained on a rectangular deck for she is uncontainable, so I improvised with an deck area that could be danced on several levels. The outer levels tilt so that anything placed on them slide off toward the center, and built with portals that promise escape but all lead circuitously back to the main dance area, rather like a hamster habitat. I rounded the edges and varied the angles for nature has few straight lines and fewer right angles and my wife is nature personified, and that made the whole deck railing more difficult, you see, which I then electrified because I knew she would make several attempts at an over-the-rail vault. The deck areas are also surrounded by a moat that I populated with piranhas that I feed regularly by dropping in a steak so they're veritably trained to converge en mass, along with back up electric eels and those really gross blood-sucking slugs, all to discourage wandering beyond the safety of boundaries I set forth with my architecture. The deck itself is fitted with sprinklers at its farthermost points that spray a mist with power hose force to warn the little sylph-like dancing scamp whenever her dance gives the appearance of breaking loose or she nears the end of her retractible chain.

Titus...I understand that the vegan ideal in Hindu culture comes from disgust at eating the animals that may have contained re-incarnated people or even worse may offend one of the animal gods in the pantheon of known gods.Religion is hard on folks.

Go to a restaurant and watch one of em struggle with the menu. Completely painful. And don't even get me started with the order process, I am ready to pull out my beautiful hair. I also get a notion in my head that I would like to punch him during the entire ordeal...really hard in the face, probably not a good sign.

I also have dreams of strapping him to a chair and stuffing a T Bone down his vegetarian mouth and then watching his head explode.